Played a game with the above list last weekend vs the old Moonclan Grots. We played Duality of Death in Hysh with the realm scape feature that gives -1 to hit if you’re in cover. His list was approximately:

2 bosses

2 shaman

Fungoid cave shaman

40 spear gobbos with netters

3 fanatics

Mangler squig

Colossal Squig

Squig Gobba

2x 10 squig herd units

So going into deployment I knew that I had fewer drops so would get the first turn. Nothing he has can fly or teleport so skink lines will do well as screens. I have a total of 5 heroes/behemoths and he has 7 so eliminating all his scoring units straight off the bat is unlikely unless the bunch up. My plan going into the game was go heavy on the left flank as the Slann likes to be near the engines and try and hold that point all game while quickly grabbing the right objective with shadowstrike skinks and starpriests, hold out for a turn or two by fleeing/summoning starlight on my screens. The rippers will try and take out some key pieces turn 1 and the prime will stay in the sky usually till turn 2 or 3 and well see where I need him.

So its slann 2x 10 skinks, 2x engines on the left flank. 2x10 skinks and a starpriest on the right flank.

He deploys 40 gobbos, colossal squig, boss and shaman on the right the gobba in the center and the squig herds, mangler and the rest of the heroes on the right flank.

I pregame move up my shadowstrike units so they can easily get the right objective on turn 1 and then elect to go first.

T1 his colossal squig, shaman and boss are all quite close together so I figure I’ll drop the rippers on them and secure my right flank. Both engines give me mortal wounds and I aim them at the colossal squig but only manage 3 wounds total (I wanted to aim at the characters but they were out of range). I fail to cast summon starlight and also fail to summon a balewind with the slann. One unit of left skinks teleports to in front of the 40 block of goblins to hold them up but the second unit fails its teleport and stays where it is. I generate 6 summoning points. I place the toad near his colossal squig and heroes.

The gryph feather engine moves up to claim the objective and the slann and other engine move up to flank it. On the left flank the skinks move to surround the point as the starpriest moves onto it claiming that one. Rippers drop and the fanatics pop out of the gobbo unit but fail to make the charge. I get the rippers in but had to pull in the fanatics too if I want maximum coverage. Rippers kill the colossal squig and the shaman but lose 5 in total thanks to the fanatics and boss attacks. 5 squigs pop out the dead colossal squig. I score 2 points.

His turn one some of his spells take my star priest down to 1 wound and hurt the right skink units. Everything moves forward as far as it can except for the boss and fanatics fighting the rippers. Importantly the heroes on the right have moved up but not nearly close enough to claim the objective. His shooting does nothing. He charges and crucially fails with the mangler on the right. Everything else makes it but it’s all hitting skink screens. The gobbos on the left kill the skinks. The rippers are finished off for nothing in return. The skink screen on the right losses about half their number but retreat away to tightly surround the starpriest. He scores 0 points.

T2 he wins priority. He tries to finish off my starpriest with magic but failed. He uses the left flank boss’ command ability on the giant block of 40 gobbos meaning they do a mortal wound on a to wound role of 6. His shooting is once again ineffectual. He moves up his remaining characters towards the objectives on either side. The squigs that popped out of the colossal squig are kind of just hanging out in the middle of the board. He charges the goblins into the objective holding gryph feather engine on the left and all the squigs including mangler into the skinks and starpriest on the right. The gobbos surround and put 6 wounds on the steg, who only kills a couple gobbos in return. A lot of -1s to hit in that combat turns it into a bit of a pillow fight. On the right flank he kills everything and takes the objective. He scores 1 point.

My Turn 2. The damaged engine heals itself a couple of wounds and the undamaged one spins up D6 mortal wounds and does three wounds to his left flank boss. The slann banks 9 summoning points for a total of 15 right now. In the movement phase I move up my undamaged engine, slann and skinks to surround the large gobbo unit. I also drop the prime this turn 9 away from his big unit. The prime drops a comet of the left boss’ head and kills him so there will be no inspiring presence to the large block of gobbos and he also gets the three fanatics. I charge with everything into the gobbos and spend 3 command points on the realm ability to make the prime, both stegs and slann have a chance to attack before the gobbos get to go. Thanks to the netters the unit survives but I killed around 20 of them. The reduction in numbers and the multiple attacking units meant they did a smattering of damage to all my heroes but none were killed or even hurt that badly. Battleshock left 3 surviving goblins in combat with my skinks. I hold the objective for a second turn so score 2 points making it 4-1.

T3 I win priority and give it to him as he has nothing that can get far enough across the board to threaten me. It is possible that his squig gobba could kill my objective engine and reset my scoring counter but I’m not really worried about it. The game has kind of turned into battle for the pass as we are essentially playing lengthways down the table. He moves his mangler and 2 units of squigs towards my line so they end up around the center of the board. The squig gobba does nothing. He scores 2 points making it 4-3.

In my turn, both engines end up healing everything around them before I teleport the non objective holding engine over to the right to threaten the models he has holding the objective. The Slann banks 9 more summoning points. Everything moves to solidify my objective as now all I have to do is hold it to win the game, while he has to attack me and defend his objective. The slann summon 2 units of 3 rippers towards the centre of the board near a mangler and the unit of 5 squigs. I charge with the rippers and engine and make all of them. The rippers kill the mangler and unit of skinks but the engine does nothing to a goblin shaman….. I score three points making it 7-3.

We call the game there as its clear that he can’t even make it to my side of the board to threaten my objective whereas a few shamans and squigs were not going to survive rippers, a prime and an engine coming for his.

So a win for the seraphon my plan went the way I wanted it to but I made some really big mistakes and learned a lot.

1) I don’t like the balewind. It needs to be around for 2 hero phases to get value and if it fails to go off or is unbound the turn I try to summon it I lose a spell/3 summoning points. Having it in the list is just temptation to use it so I think I’ll be dropping it. I also like to move my slann around and knowing I will always have up to 9 summoning points (no more, no less) lets me have a more preplanned battle plan.

2) I need to summon things earlier BEFORE I need them. This is mainly for positioning reasons so that Skink screens can’t be zoned out.

3) Don’t try and teleport something if a move+run is good enough…

So looking heres were points 2) and 3) really showed. In T1 I did not prepare well enough for being doubled going into T2. To recap what happened; one unit of skinks teleports and screens in front of his lines, one unit fails to teleport, the gryph feather engine claims the objective, Slann gets 6 summoning points. He hits the skink screen, kills it, gets the double and charges the engine giving him the chance of taking the objective away from me T2. What I should have done was: ; one unit of skinks teleports and screens in front of his lines, Slann gets 6 summoning points (9 if I don’t mess up the balewind…..), engine moves up, skink unit moves and runs either as a second screen in front of the steg or just surrounding it depending on role, slann runs up and summons a third layer of skinks. This way there’s no way those goblins touch the objective engine till turn 3.

4) Ripper targeting. I overkilled his colossal squig so hard I didn’t even use their beak attacks…. I definitely could have allocated attacks better and likely could have killed the squig, shaman, boss and fanatics, not lost any rippers and then he has a whole bigger problem to deal with. This is only my second game with rippers so it’s something I need to just get more games with to get a feel for what they can do.

5) Rippers are garbage on my opponents turn…. Yeah not getting the swoop rerolls sucks. I need to plan and position them better so that ideally, they kill everything they touch when they drop and then maybe they can survive till my next turn.

Played a game with the above list last weekend vs the old Moonclan Grots.

Click to expand...

So I’m assuming his opponent hasn’t got the Gloomspite Gitz Battletome yet. In any case, it’s still on pre-order so he couldn’t have one yet at this point anyway unless he’s a YouTube blogger and GW gave him a free one (yes that does happen)